Cahoots

Been talking shop with a Secondary teacher of my acquaintance and esteem. As far as I can make out, FE and Secondary teaching is very similar on paper when it comes to hours and time. The only real difference I can see is the amount of work a secondary teacher has to mark each week, and the class sizes, which makes more marking and more work. I'm guessing it would be impossible to fit all of this into PPA time, which, I'm told, is 10% of contact time, roughly 2¹⁄_bit hours. Even after an insane first couple of years teaching a subject and getting all the materials made and courses planned, it would still take more than this to do a good job.

My other point of curiosity was about status, arising out of my current stagnation. I see him as a real teacher, as he was trained before he started, works incredibly hard and genuinely aims to disturb his students to the point where they can learn (his Nazi party-piece is the stuff of legend). He, on the other hand, sees me as the real teacher, as I deal with skills and people who feel the need for these skills in the real world.

Perhaps we're both individually thinking that we're still not quite good enough for the responsibilities we've taken on. From where we're standing, the other one looks like an expert, and the trouble with experts is they make everything look easy.

Stagnation

I've become stagnant. It's hard to admit, but after a string of decidedly average observations, I have to face the fact that I'm not as good a teacher as I think I am.

The abstractions and distractions of Masters level study seemingly do not help. Instead, they suggest pretense and smugness, not things you want when you're coasting along doing as little work as possible to keep your classes fresh and experimental.

The temptation is to read more stuff about language teaching, and take a step back from the scholarly, worthy articles. What I really need to do is pull my finger out.